Indian cinema expert for Cineworld Cinemas Ashanti Omkar told Digital Spy: "The film Josh is an incredibly powerful one, made by a woman director from Pakistan."

Omkar explained that one of the aims of the festival is to introduce audiences to other forms of cinema beyond Bollywood.

"This year at the London Indian Film Festival, the programming team sought after films in many of the regional languages of India, from Punjabi and Marathi, to Gujarati, Malayalam, Bengali and for the first time, a Pakistani film, in Urdu," he said.

"Other festival favourites have included the much lauded Pune 52, the beautiful Spanish language film set in India, Mapa, and Shahid, Hansal Mehta's adaptation of a real-life story of an activist lawyer.

"Also generating a lot of buzz is the Kannada film Lucia by Pawan Kumar, which has already sold out its world premiere and festival screening - this marks the first crowd-sourced film from South India."